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This is a seductive title; one would indeed like to see a book which, as this claims to do, presents, "possibly for the first time, the myths and legends in their translated form"--but this is not it. In fact, where myth anti legend motifs are presented they are only story outlines, with no reference to genre, source, date, motif indexes, and very few references to research literature (where these exist they never include page numbers). In fact, this book contains more misinformation and failures of communication than I have ever found in a book claiming to be an encyclopaedia.

One is first alerted to the historical and linguistic inaccuracy of the book in the historical notes on Russian titles at the beginning of the book, in "How to Use this Book." They are all wrong in detail: most importantly, the title of tsar was occasionally used for the Grand Prince at the end of the fifteenth century, but the tsar in question was not Ivan IV ("the Terrible") but Ivan III ("the Great"); officially the title ended not in 1917 but with Peter the Great in 1721 (although it continued in unofficial use). The title was also used of Tatar khans, Biblical kings, and of various rulers in folk genres. The alleged distinction between tsaritsa and tsarina does not exist: the latter term is not a Russian word at all, but a west European coinage.

Particularly odd entries include that on "Alexander the Great," which suggests that his importance in Russian literary and folk culture is due to Armenian intermediaries, but makes no mention of the fact that the two versions of Pseudo-Callisthenes known in Russia (from Greece via South Slavs) were the most widely known secular texts in medieval Russia; the entry on "Arthur, King" suggests that echoes of the Arthurian cycle might have been brought to the Slavs by Roman soldiers (which raises chronological questions) but does not mention the story of Tristan, which came to Russia as a romance from the West in the sixteenth century. The totally erroneous entry for "koldun" (wizard) claims that these flourished in the Varangian period and were descended from ancient shamans, and that their female counterparts were "volkhvy." In fact the word koldun is not recorded before the seventeenth century, and volkhvy (who might well have been shamans in some cases) were usually men (e.g. the word is used for the Three Magi). The Lay of Igor's Campaign entry repeats some tendentious old Soviet source to the effect that the work "reflects the political and social atmosphere at a time when the general populace was calling for a curbing of the autocratic powers of the rulers"--it does not mention any of the many mythic and legendary elements, or the fact that some scholars doubt its authenticity. St Nicolas, crucial to Russian folk belief (to many he was the same as God), occurs only under the name of Nikolai of Mozhaisk, the name of a thaumaturgic Russian icon type, and is illustrated.

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